I’d met Erica once before, a week earlier, when she was dripping with pig’s blood swiped from a local butcher. Somebody had jerry-rigged a bucket and rope over the front door and waited in the woods to douse whoever came outside. I assumed that Gordon had been the intended target, but Erica wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fact that she didn’t go to pieces told me a lot about her. I’d interviewed both of them together, and Erica didn’t freak out or shed a single tear. She sat on the front steps, covered in animal blood that had begun to freeze, and told me the story with a kind of frigid, furious calm.
Gordon was the one who looked ready to throw up the whole time I was there.
“Do you know who assaulted me?” Erica asked, as if she’d guessed that I was thinking about our previous encounter.
“I’m sorry, I don’t.”
She turned her head, piercing me in the gloom of the car with her blue eyes. “Do you not know, or do you not care?”
“I do care, but the fact is, nobody’s talking.”
“We both know Sandra Thoreau was behind it,” Erica replied.
“Well, if she was, it’s not likely that I’ll ever be able to prove it. Plenty of people hate this lawsuit, but Sandra has people who are on her side, too. Even the ones who want to see her lose don’t want to see the mine win.”
Erica offered a thin smile. “Gordon said the same thing. He didn’t want to call the police after I was attacked. He said it would just make Sandra’s people feel like they’d won some sort of victory. They’ve been harassing us for months, you know. I was willing to let it slide for other things, but not this time. I called the sheriff myself to report it. No offense, but I wasn’t surprised when he sent a junior deputy. And a woman, too. Believe me, I got the message. I should just take a shower and shut up.”
I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but in fact, the sheriff had used almost those exact words when he’d sent me out here.
We reached the end of the dirt road, where a large clearing had been carved out of the wilderness. The house that Gordon Brink was renting was four stories high, a log-and-flagstone home that looked like an old national park resort hotel. There were several outbuildings on the property, including a barn and machine shed, a hunting lodge in which to clean the guns and hang the dead animals, and a guest cottage that was larger than my own house. The property was a summer home for the retired president of the mine. While he wintered in Florida, Gordon had taken it over to get ready for the upcoming trial.
Erica and I got out of my cruiser. The door of the nearby garage was open, and I saw matching Mercedes sedans parked inside. His and hers. One was spotless, and the other was covered in snow and road spray.
“So tell me what’s going on,” I said.
Erica nodded at her car, which was the dirty one. “Like I told you on the phone, I got back here about two hours ago. I spent several days with my parents in Minnesota, but I drove all day to spend Christmas with Gordon and Jay. But Gordon’s not here. As you can see, his car is still in the garage, but I’ve searched the entire house, and I can’t find him anywhere.”
“It’s a little early to push the panic button,” I told her. “Isn’t it possible he spent Christmas Eve with one of the other lawyers?”
“You mean, is he shacking up with a woman on the team because I was away?” she asked in a chilly voice. “If that’s what you’re thinking, then no. Most of the other members of the legal team went home for Christmas. I called the ones who stayed in the area. He’s not with them. And he has no friends among the locals. Plus, Gordon knew I was coming back tonight. He said he would stay up and work until I got home.”
“When did you last talk to him?”
“Sunday afternoon. He didn’t have any plans to leave the house over the Christmas weekend. I tried calling again last night, but I didn’t reach him. Then I tried again before I left this morning and I stopped to call from the road, too. There was no answer. Trust me, Deputy, this is not like Gordon.”
“Did you talk to his son?” I asked.
“Of course. Jay hasn’t seen Gordon since breakfast on Sunday.”
“Did he say whether his father was home the whole time?”
“That’s what he told me. He never saw the car leave.”
“He and Gordon have been home together for two days, and Jay didn’t see him or talk to him?”
Erica rolled her eyes. “Their relationship is... difficult.”
“Did you search the entire house? It’s a big place.”
“I did. I checked in all the usual spaces where we spend time. I also called to him on the intercom, which is wired to every room. When he didn’t answer, I got worried, so I checked each room methodically. Every room, closet, bathroom. He’s not in the house.”
When Erica Brink said she’d done something methodically, I believed her.
“The most likely explanation is still that he’s with someone else in town,” I said. “If you haven’t heard from him by morning—”
She cut me off midsentence. “I am concerned, Deputy. I don’t want to wait until morning. Gordon is not with anyone. Last week, I was the target of a humiliating assault, and now I get back home to find my husband missing. He’s the lead defense attorney in a lawsuit that has generated countless threats from people in this area. I want to find him right now.”
I knew she wasn’t going to let me go.
I also knew that if I woke up my partner, Darrell, at three o’clock on Christmas morning, I’d better have more to show him than an angry trophy wife.
“Did you notice anything out of order in the house when you came home?” I asked. “Any sign of intruders or a break-in?”
“No.”
“Any footprints in the snow? Tire tracks?”
“No. Other than my own.”
“Did you check the outbuildings?”
“Yes, I walked around the entire property. I went inside all the other buildings except the guest cottage. Gordon uses that as his office.”
“Why didn’t you check the office? I thought you said he was going to work until you got back.”
“The office is where he keeps confidential legal files on the litigation. The door is always locked when he’s not there. No one else gets inside. I walked down there and checked. The lights were off.”
“Still, if that’s the one place you didn’t go inside, I think we should check it out, don’t you?”
Erica frowned with obvious reluctance. “Yes, all right.”
We hiked through the snow beside the trees and needed flashlights to guide us. Erica stayed close to me. I could tell that the wilderness made her nervous, but to me, the sounds in the darkness were like old friends. And of course, I did what I always did when I was near the woods. I listened for him. I’d been searching the forests of Black Wolf County for years to try to find the beast again. I knew he was out there somewhere, and I had the strange sense that he was looking for me, too.
The one-story A-frame cottage that Gordon had been using as his office was on the far side of a shallow hill. In the snow, I could make out Erica’s footprints where she’d come here earlier to look for her husband. The front door was locked, just as Erica had said. I knocked, but there was no answer. I circled the entire cottage and peered through each window, but the curtains were closed, and there were no lights on inside.
“I think we should go in,” I said.
“I don’t have a key.”
“I can break a window, but I need your permission to do that. The alternative is to wait until morning to see if Gordon comes back.”